Indigo Rose creates MSI Authoring Tool based on WiX
Indigo Rose Corp. is the maker of various setup, update and autorun tools. Like all of the setup tools from the pre-MSI era their Setup Factory product is using a proprietary technology.
But now Indigo Rose is working on a new product called "Setup Factory for Windows Installer" to author MSI packages (beta registration just started).
Setup Factory for Windows Installer doesn’t create .msi files directly. Instead it generates .wxs files which then are compiled into an .msi file using the open source Windows Installer XML toolset (WiX). It looks like this might become common practice. While there have been several open source projects to create graphical IDEs for WiX, a few months ago WiXAware from InstallAware Software Corp. was the first commercial tool that used this approach. Now Indigo Rose goes the same route.
There is very little public information about Setup Factory for Windows Installer so it’s unknown how much of the WiX functionality they will support, like Fragments (which Rob Mensching found lacking in WiXAware).
Setup Factory for Windows Installer Beta announcement